like the splendor of the unseen sun at dawn

Exercise #5 discussed a 1983 paper by Forrest Carter on proposed fabrication techniques for “molecular electronics”—electronic devices made from molecular building blocks, which held or hold promise for extending Moore’s Law beyond the limits of silicon. One question was “How many of these methods do you think are in use today, almost 35 years later?” I don’t want to imply […]

Here it is: the post after a years-long hiatus explaining that the author hopes to revive the blog. You’ve seen this before; you know how often it works. For good luck, I made a real post before this one. I had a good first month the first time around, then slowed down and stopped over the […]

[As always, I’m not promising this is a good use of your time, but you might find it stimulating.] Here is a paper from 1983: In anticipation of the continued size reduction of switching elements to the molecular level, new approaches to materials, memory, and switching elements have been developed. Two of the three most […]

I recently added a few items to my “messy micro-histories of science” section here, reproduced below: Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson wrote “A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science” (2005) about the strange sort of inward-turning and withering of nuclear weapons science in the post-testing era. That field (as well as national labs and megaprojects more generally) often […]

Consider the following experimental results: People who became vegetarians for ethical reasons were found to be more committed to their diet choice and remained vegetarians for longer than those who did so for health reasons. Loyalty to expert advisers (doctors, financial advisors, etc.) leads to higher prices but not necessarily better services. Smokers who viewed […]

Beyond Discovery™: The Path from Research to Human Benefit is a series of articles that trace the origins of important recent technological and medical advances. Each story reveals the crucial role played by basic science, the applications of which could not have been anticipated at the time the original research was conducted. The National Academy […]

When she lost her faith I said that falsehood yes feels true from inside, and in that moment she was born again. There’s an old joke. Two lovers freed a genie who would grant them one wish. They wished to switch bodies for a day, so that they might better know each other and thereby grow […]

Normally the 2012 publication date would make this too recent for benthic canon, but Michael Huemer’s In Praise of Passivity was written in my heart long ago. The abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability […]

“Casuistry” is today a near synonym for “sophistry”: a certain kind of intricate, deceptive reasoning; highly pejorative. The word originally referred to case-by-case moral analysis (and, as philosophical jargon, still does). But the casuist, evidently, abused the rich particularities offered by reality to justify his prior intuitions. With a torrent of excuses and exceptions he […]